Monday, May 04, 2015

The two faces of the Nakba

Supporters of the Arab Nakba protestAs 14 May approaches - the date which Arabs mark their Nakba Day 67 years since Israel declared its independence, Zvi Gabay writing in News 1 draws attention to the other Nakba - the Jewish flight and dispossession from Arab countries. Whereas EU governments and churches are happy to fund organisations which promote awareness of the Arab Nakba (and the Israeli public purse even funds the Nakba agitationby Arab MKs) no such finance is forthcoming for those groups representing Jews displaced from Arab countries.

While
many Israelis celebrated the 67 th year of independence of the country, which
was bought with much blood, hundreds of Israeli Arabs, led by
their leaders, came out to protest against the celebrations, namely to
demonstrate against Israel.Including the Arab MKs' Joint List, they carried the slogan "your
independence day (the Jews) is our Nakba (catastrophe)." NGOs such as Balada, Zochrot and Adalah
financed by foreign governments, have adopted the Palestinian narrative that
includes the "right of return" - that is, the destruction of Israel. It
was amazing to hear the demonstrators crying out: "Nakba" - a disaster.
The disaster was in 1948. Arabs, but also many Jews, paid with
their lives. The two sides fought each other until they reached an impasse.

But who brought this disaster on the world?

Apparently, with the passage of time we have to go back and remind them that the sole culprits of the Palestinian Nakba are the predecessors of the
current Arab leaders.
They, who in 1947 rejected the UN proposal to divide the land of Israel,
which was under British mandate into two states - Jewish and Arab. This
is in contrast to the leaders of the Yishuv, who were willing to
compromise and accept the division. Not only the Arab leaders
rejected the proposed partition, they also misled their people into a
bloody war against the Jewish community, in order to obtain all of
Palestine. They harnessed the Arab states to the chariot of war, spread a conflagration throughout the Middle East, and eventually led to the permanent Arab refugee problem we see today.

You would have expected from Arab leaders, living in security and democracy in Israel to recognize the errors of their predecessors, led by
Haj Amin al-Husseini for causing the Nakba, for turning some 600,000
Arabs who lived here into refugees. These leaders have also caused a large-scale human tragedy for the Jews who lived in Arab countries for thousands of years.
Those Arab leaders encouraged the Arab governments, through the Arab
League, to conduct a campaign of hatred, incitement, dispossession of
property and deportation of their Jewish citizens, most of whom came to
Israel as refugees.
Newspapers of the time indicate the extent of hatred directed at Jews
even before the establishment of Israel. Riots of great cruelty occurred in Iraq in 1941 (the Farhud); there were riots in Libya and Aden in 1945 - 1947.
After the establishment of the State of Israel, Jews continued to suffer severel in all Arab countries; Egypt expelled Jews from their homes in
the dead of night. Of 900 thousand Jews living in Arab countries in 1948, today there are only about 4,000 today.

The tragedy of the Jewish refugees from Arab countriesremained almost only in the memories of the refugee families, it has
been forgotten in public discourse and is missing fromthe history books. Jews from Arab countries were not financed like Palestinian Arab organizations by foreign
governments to tell their tragedy and to support their claims for
compensation for the property they left.
The time has come for Israel to mark the legacy of our refugees, to
get internationally recognized the human tragedy which the Palestinian Arabs,
with the active assistance of the Arab countries, have caused.

Remembering the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands is important but only if that includes the expulsions of centuries-old Palestinian Jewish communities. Otherwise, the Jewish Nakba commemoration doesn't really mean much.

Davsil apparently means Hebron, 1929, Gaza city, 1929, Shfar`am, Sh'khem/Nablus, etc. During the Israeli war of independence, 1947-49, Jews were driven from neighborhoods in what became Arab-occupied "east Jerusalem" starting in December 1947, and from Neveh Ya`aqov, `Atarot, Gush Etsion, Kfar Darom, etc. in 1948. These Jews could not return until 1967, although Jews driven from parts of south Tel Aviv and Haifa could return when combat ended in 1948.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)